Biography

b. 1955, Newark, NJ
Lives and works in Chicago, IL

Pope.L is a visual artist and educator whose multidisciplinary practice uses binaries, contraries and preconceived notions embedded within contemporary culture to create art works in various formats, for example, writing, painting, performance, installation, video and sculpture. Building upon his long history of enacting arduous, provocative, absurdist performances and interventions in public spaces, Pope.L applies some of the same social, formal and performative strategies to his interests in language, system, gender, race and community. The goals for his work are several: joy, money and uncertainty— not necessarily in that order.

Pope.L began his career in the 1970s, creating works that find their foothold in personal travail, reading philosophy, and performance and theatre training with Geoff Hendricks and Mabous Mines. He studied at Pratt Institute and later received his BA from Montclair State College in 1978. He also attended the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art before earning his MFA from Rutgers University in 1981. His first performances occurred on the street, and later at major and historic venues, such as Anthology Film Archives, Franklin Furnace, Just Above Midtown, Museum of Modern Art, New Museum, Performa, The Sculpture Center, and the 2002 Whitney Biennial in New York; MIT and Mobius in Boston; MOCA Los Angeles; Shinjuku Station in Tokyo; Diverse Works in Houston; Cleveland Institute of Art in Ohio; Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead Quays, UK; Prospect.2 in New Orleans; Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; and CAM Houston, among others. Major performances include Baile (2016); The Problem (2016); Pull (2013); The Black Factory national tour (2002–2009); The Great White Way (2001–2002); Community Crawls (2000–2005); Eating the Wall Street Journal (2000); Black Domestic aka Roach Motel Black (1994); How Much is that Nigger in the Window (1990-1992); Times Square Crawl (1978); and Thunderbird Immolation (1978).

Recent exhibitions, performances, and projects include Flint Water Project at What Pipeline, Detroit (2017);Whispering Campaign at documenta 14, Athens and Kassel (2017); Claim (Whitney Version) at the 2017 Whitney Biennial (2017); PLAMA (The Spot), a commercial commissioned for On the Tip of the Tongue at Museum of Modern Art Warsaw (2016); Baile at the 32nd Biennal de São Paulo (2016); The Freedom Principle at ICA Philadelphia (2016) and MCA Chicago (2015); The Public Body at Artspace, Sydney (2016); Less than One at Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2016); Trinket at The Geffen Contemporary, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2015); Black Pulp! at Yale School of Art, New Haven and IPCNY in New York (2016); Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art at Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, CAM Houston, and Studio Museum in New York (2014); Claim at Littman Gallery, Portland State University, Portland, OR (2014); Cage Unrequited at Performa, New York (2013); Forlesen at The Renaissance Society, University of Chicago, Chicago (2013); and A Long White Cloud, Te Tuhi, Auckland, New Zealand (2013).

His work has also been the subject of important group and solo shows throughout the span of his almost 50-year career, including Against the Grain: Wood in Contemporary Craft and Design, Museum of Art and Design, New York (2013); superhuman, Central Utah Art Center, Ephraim (2012); Reenactor, Williams Center Gallery at Lafayette College, Easton, PA (2012); The Last Newspaper, New Museum, New York (2010); 30 Seconds Off an Inch, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2009); Corbu Pops, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA (2009); Thirty Americans, Rubell Family Collection, Miami (2008); Black Is, Black Ain’t, Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago (2008); Drawing, Dreaming, Drowning at Art Institute of Chicago (2008); Art After White People: Time, Trees, and Celluloid . . . at Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica, CA (2007); William Pope.L: The Black Factory and Other Good Works, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2007); 7e Biennale de l’Art Africaine Contemporaine, Dakar, Senegal (2006); Double Consciousness: Black Conceptual Art since 1970, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (2005); The Interventionists: Art in the Social Sphere, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams (2004); The Big Nothing, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (2004); Only Skin Deep, International Center of Photography, New York (2004); William Pope.L: the friendliest Black artist in America at ICA at Maine College of Art, Portland, DoverseWorks Artspace in Houston, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, ME, Artists Space in New York, and Mason Gross Art Galleries at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ (2002-2004); eRacism: Retrospective Exhibition, Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art, Portland (2002); eRacism: White Room, Thread Waxing Space, New York (2000); Eating the Wall Street Journal and Other Current Consumptions, Mobius, Boston (2000); and Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949–1979, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1998).

Pope.L at Williams College Museum of Art

Active Ingredients: Prompts, Props, Performance

October 20, 2017 – January 7, 2018

At the Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA) Active Ingredients: Prompts, Props, Performance flips the script on the performativity of art objects and the objectness of human performers. This two-part show consists of both a theatrical event and a gallery-based exhibition. Together, the two parts reverse the common distinction of performance as “live” and art objects as “dead.”

Pope.L at Logan Center Gallery at the Art Institute of Chicago

Brown People Are the Wrens in the Parking Lot

November 10, 2017 – January 7, 2018

Brown People Are the Wrens in the Parking Lot was intitated by artist and University of Chicago Department of VIsual Arts Faculty member Pope.L, and facilitated by faculty, students, staff and community members of the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts to reflect on issues of connectedness, home and immigration. The exhibition is on view from November 10, 2017 through January 7, 2018 in the Logan Center Gallery and gathers various ephemera from the campaign as well as serves as a space for open conversation, relaxation and reflection.

Wanderlust: Actions, Traces, and Journeys 1967-2017

September 7 - December 31, 2017

Pope.L at KADIST

If Not Apollo, the Breeze

October 11 – December 16, 2017

If Not Apollo, the Breeze, curated by Jordan Stein, takes the literary history of the ancient oracle at Delphi as its starting point to explore the irrational, ambiguous, infallible, portentous, performative, hallucinatory, and predictive. Like the oracle itself, the exhibition presents a series of coded messages that address a future that is both hard to discern and right under our feet, like a road. Nine artists and one underground newspaper are included.

Pope.L at What Pipeline

Flint Water Project

September 7 - October 21, 2017

Chicago-based artist Pope.L, who has been making public interventionist art for over twenty years, comes to Detroit artist-run gallery What Pipeline with Flint Water, on view September 7 through October 21, 2017. Conceived by Pope.L as one Midwest city helping another, both struck by similar blight, Flint Water is an art installation, a performance and an intervention that calls attention to the water crisis in Flint by bottling Flint tap water and putting it on display in Detroit.

Pope.L at Pratt Institute

Survey Exhibition (part I): Camerado, this is no book

October 7 – 15, 2017

This survey exhibition, presented in two parts, brings together the artworks of participants within Pratt Institute’s program over the course of the past 125-plus years. Part one, Camerado, this is no book, curated by Jenni Crain, takes its title from Walt Whitman’s poem “So Long!” first published as the final poem in the third release of Leaves of Grass in 1860.

Pope.L in Documenta14

Whispering Campaign

June 10 - September 17, 2017

Mitchell-Innes & Nash congratulates Pope.L on his inclusion in documenta 14 for which he conceived a new sound performance piece that takes place partially in the streets. The "Whispering Campaign" will run for the 100 days in both Athens and Kassel. Five performers will wander throughout designated areas of the city either broadcasting a pre-recorded score in English, Greek and German or whispering live their observations as they roam the city.

Performances occur Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays in designated areas throughout both cities. In addition to the live performances occurring three days a week, there will be several broadcasts of the pre-recorded text will play at select documenta 14 venues.

WHITNEY MUSEUM ANNOUNCES 2017 BUCKSBAUM AWARD TO POPE.L

Established in 2000 by longtime Whitney Museum of American Art trustee Melva Bucksbaum and her family, the Bucksbaum Award recognizes an artist included in the Whitney Biennial “who has previously produced a significant body of work, whose project for the Biennial is itself outstanding, and whose future artistic contribution promises to be lasting.”

Pope.L at Martos Gallery

Invisible Man

May 3 - June 24, 2017

Pope.L in Documenta14

Whispering Campaign

April 8 - July 16, 2017

Mitchell-Innes & Nash congratulates Pope.L on his inclusion in documenta 14 for which he conceived a new sound performance piece that takes place partially in the streets. The "Whispering Campaign" will run for the 100 days in both Athens and Kassel. Five performers will wander throughout designated areas of the city either broadcasting a pre-recorded score in English, Greek and German or whispering live their observations as they roam the city.

Performances occur Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays in designated areas throughout both cities. In addition to the live performances occurring three days a week, there will be several broadcasts of the pre-recorded text will play at select documenta 14 venues.

March 17, 2017 - June 11, 2017

Pope.L at The Barnes Foundation

Person of the Crowd: The Contemporary Art of Flânerie

February 25 - May 22, 2017

Pope.L is included in The Barnes Foundation's exhibition, Person of the Crowd: The Contemporary Art of Flânerie, which features work by more than 50 international artists who have taken to the street to play detective, make fantastic maps, scavenge and shop for new materials, launch guerrilla campaigns, and make provocative spectacles of themselves to speak to issues as diverse as commodity fetishism, gentrification, gender politics, globalization, racism, and homelessness.

Pope.L at Purchase College, SUNY

Punching Up

February 22 - March 24, 2017

Pope.L at The Museum of Modern at Art Warsaw

PLAMA/THE SPOT

October 2016

PLAMA is a tv spot Pope.L produced in October 2016 in Warsaw. The spot had its premiere in Poland on November 10, on the eve of the Independence Day in Warsaw and two days past the presidential elections in the U.S.

Pope.L in Unlimited at Art Basel

June 13, 2016

Pope.L at The Walker Art Center

Less Than One

April 7 - December 31, 2016

Less Than One is an international, multigenerational group show offering in-depth presentations of work from the 1960s to the present by 16 artists central to the Walker’s collection. Included alongside such signature artworks as Sigmar Polke’s Mrs. Autumn and Her Two Daughters (1991) are major acquisitions on view here for the first time, including Ericka Beckman’s You The Better, Film Installation (1983/2015), Adrian Piper’s The Mythic Being: Sol’s Drawing #1–5 (1974), and Renée Green’s Bequest (1991), among other featured pieces.

Pope.L at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

Cage Unrequited

Nov 21–22, 2015

Cage Unrequited is a 25-hour marathon reading of experimental composer John Cage’s influential book Silence: Lectures and Writings (1961) organized by visual artist Pope.L. The performance reimagines the book for contemporary audiences by filtering a bit of the past through the voices and attitudes of a diverse community of more than 100 invited readers from Chicago.

Pope.L in the The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 to Now

Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

July 11 - November 22, 2015

The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 to Now links the vibrant legacy of the 1960s African American avant-garde to current art and culture. It is occasioned in part by the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), a still-flourishing organization of Chicago musicians whose interdisciplinary explorations expanded the boundaries of jazz. Alongside visual arts collectives such as the African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists (AfriCOBRA), the AACM was part of a deep engagement with black cultural nationalism both in Chicago and around the world during and after the civil rights era. Combining historical materials with contemporary responses, The Freedom Principle illuminates the continued relevance of that engagement today.

Pope.L: Trinket

The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles

March 20 - June 28, 2015

Pope.L: Trinket is an exhibition of new and recent work by the Chicago-based artist, an essential figure in the development of performance and body art since the 1970s. The exhibition will be installed in the soaring spaces of the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA and is comprised of large-scale installations, and features a new performance and sculpture work made specifically for the exhibition. Pope.L: Trinket is curated by MOCA Senior Curator Bennett Simpson.

Pope.L's "The Limner Performance" published by Triple Canopy

November 20, 2014

A preface is usually written after the fact. And so is this thing you are about to read.

A performance of the text occurred on April 26, 2014 at the Whitney Museum of American Art and was enacted by five street artists (four Chinese and one Caucasian) who drew sketches of the audience. On my signal, they threw these sketches into the air. A dancer playing a waitress repeatedly dropped napkins beneath a sound track of drones, trains, and rains and me, yours truly, at the podium voicing a version of the text that follows. What does a preface ever really tell us? That something else follows. And the thing, the thing that follows, preceded the thing with which you first started.zzZ

Pope.L at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art

July 24, 2014 - January 4, 2015

This groundbreaking exhibition is the first comprehensive survey of performance art by black artists working from the perspective of the visual arts from the 1960s to the present. While black performance has been largely contextualized as an extension of theater, visual artists have integrated performance into their work for more than five decades, generating an important history that has gone largely unrecognized until now.

Pope.L Performs 'Cage Unrequited'

Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center

November 16 - 17, 2013 10:58 AM - 11:57 AM

Iconic performance artist Pope.L's Cage Unrequited is a marathon reading of John Cage’s edited anthology, Silence: Lectures and Writings (1961) by over eighty invited collaborators. The performance functions as a refuge, proposing a relationship between the earlier artist’s ideas of indeterminacy, mysticism and chance and the work of contemporary black artists.

Pope.L at the Studio Museum in Harlem

Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art

November 14 - March 9, 2013

Providing a critical history beginning with Fluxus and Conceptual art in the early 1960s through present-day practices, Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art chronicles the emergence and development of black performance art over three generations, presenting a rich and complex look at this important facet of contemporary art. The exhibition comprises more than 100 works by some 36 artists, including video and photo documentation of performances, performance scores and installations, interactive works, and artworks created as a result of performance actions.

Pope.L at the Grey Art Gallery

Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art

September 10 - December 7, 2013

Radical Presence chronicles the emergence and develop-
ment of African American performance practices in contemporary art. Surveying the scene from the 1960s to the present day, this major exhibition examines the rich and complex history of black performance in the United States. The show features work of artists such as Benjamin Patterson, David Hammons, Senga Nengudi, and Coco Fusco.

A series of performances by participating artists accompanies the exhibition, which is presented in two parts: Part I, Sept. 10– Dec. 7, 2013, at the Grey Art Gallery, NYU; Part II, Nov. 14, 2013–Mar. 9, 2014, at The Studio Museum in Harlem. Radical Presence is organized by the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.

Support Pope.L's performance Pull!

Looking for Participants and Donations

June 7 - 9, 2013

Pope.L in collaboration with the arts organization SPACES, has challenged the city of Cleveland to help him pull an 8 ton former ice cream truck, by hand, 34 miles from the eastside of the city to the westside over 3 days, June 7 to 9. And he needs your help to do it.

Pope.L at the Renaissance Society, University of Chicago

April 28 - June 23, 2013

Pope.L performance at the Whitney Museum

Exhibition runs through April 28, 2013

Friday April 19, 2013

Blues for Smoke is an interdisciplinary exhibition that explores a wide range of contemporary art through the lens of the blues and blues aesthetics. In conjunction with Blues for Smoke, Pope.L will stage a performance and hands-on project that invites visitors to explore the definitions surrounding the blues, and ask how the blues “aesthetic” has migrated over place and time.

Pope.L "Reenactor" at Williams Center Gallery

Lafayette College, February 11- March 17. 2012

Video of Pope.L performance at MoMA

MoMA Case Study: Pope.L Inteprets "Fluxkit"

Last month, artist Pope.L spent a day at MoMA, exploring the collections of artists’ multiples on view in Thing/Thought: Fluxus Editions, 1962–1978. While he was here, he produced the above performance video, which incorporates the Fluxkit to incredibly humorous effect. His visit concluded a series of collaborations with visiting artists—some of them original members of Fluxus—who had been invited to select objects from the two Fluxkits on display, which are similar but not identical, and determine their arrangement. Since the late 1970s, Pope.L has produced innovative performances and installations, often tackling potent topics of race and inequality. His interventionist approach frequently involves the public; he interacts with communities, taking on the role of provocateur. At MoMA, Pope.L addressed the institutional paradigms of the Museum. His unconventional arrangement of the Fluxus objects is on view until January 16, when the exhibition closes to the public.

Pope.L at Prospect.2

October 22, 2011 - January 29, 2012

Performance artist and sculptor Pope.L will present a performance and video installation entitled Blink at Prospect.2 New Orleans, the second edition of the international contemporary art biennial. For the work, the artist asked New Orleans residents to donate photos of themselves in response to the questions: "When you dream of New Orleans, what do you dream of? When you wake up in the morning, what do you see?" These donated images will be part of a video installation mounted on a truck – a modern, traveling version of a “magic lantern” projection – that will traverse the city of New Orleans from sundown on October 22, 2011 through sunrise the following day. The video, intended to be a collective “memory bank” of the residents of New Orleans, will be stationed at Xavier University's Art Village following the performance for the duration of the biennial.

Pope.L at Eastside Projects

"CHILD", September 17- November 5, 2011

Launch 6-8 pm, September 16, 2011 "CHILD" is a new major three screen video commission and film-set installation in the main gallery of Eastside Projects, Birmingham UK. The work seeks to create an atmosphere of melodrama, strangeness and oddness informed by the artist's background in theatre and performance art. The exhibition draws upon the existing context of the gallery and its surroundings combining with the cinematic references. "CHILD" is about a small troubled family coping with the long absence and return of the father. Pope.L continues to construct surprising and unique work around the dispersion and coalescing of matter, values and concepts of what it means to be alive

Pope.L Flux This at MoMA

Friday, March 25, Celeste Bartos Theater

Flux This, with Pope.L and Special Guests Museum of Modern Art, New York Instructions, proposals, notions, a phone call, and a trampoline. A day and a half of Fluxus-inspired-and-disgusted workshops, performances, video, and interventions, concluding with an evening of short things and even shorter things. Everyone is invited! 12:00–6:30 p.m. in the Cullman Education Building mezzanine and classrooms (admission is free) 6:30 p.m. in the Celeste Bartos Theater (T3) (tickets required) Open rehearsals for this event take place on March 24. In conjunction with the exhibitions Instruction Lab and Contemporary Art from the Collection Tickets for the 6:30 p.m. theater event ($10; $8 members; $5 students, seniors, staff of other museums) can be purchased online or at the lobby information desk and the film desk.

Pope.L at FIAC

October 21 - 24

Pope.L at FIAC, Paris, October 21 - 24 Booth A40 – Mitchell-Innes & Nash New York, September, 2010: Mitchell-Innes & Nash will present a solo booth featuring Pope.L at FIAC, Paris from October 21 through 24. The works on view, dating from the 1990s to the present, will include sculpture, photographs, painting and drawing, as well as a performance in the FIAC booth.

Pope.L at the New Museum

October 6, 2010 - January 9, 2011

Mitchell-Innes & Nash is pleased to announce Pope.L's "Eating the Wall Street Journal" in the exhibition "The Last Newspaper" at the New Museum. Pope.L will supervise a performative restaging of this seminal work enlisting a team of collaborators to occasionally wander throughout the museum eating the financial daily.

New York Gallery Week

May 7-10, 2010

Mitchell-Innes & Nash is pleased to announce its participation in New York Gallery Week, May 7-10, 2010. The gallery will feature the work of William Pope.L in conjunction with New York Gallery Week's events throughout the weekend.

Pope.L talk at the New School

Monday April 19th

Mitchell-Innes & Nash is pleased to announce Pope.L's participation in SCULPTURECENTER AT THE NEW SCHOOL Expanded, Exploded, Collapsed? Monday, April 19, 2010 – 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. The New School, Theresa Lang Community and Student Center 55 West 13th Street, 2nd floor Admission: $8, free for all students as well as SculptureCenter members and New School faculty, staff, and alumni with ID.

Pope.L in the DeCordova Biennial

January 23 - April 11, 2010

Mitchell-Innes & Nash is pleased to announce Pope.L in the DeCordova Biennial. The 2010 DeCordova Biennial exhibition is the newest iteration in DeCordova's long history of showcasing contemporary art in New England. The museum is located at 51 Sandy Pond Rd, Lincoln, MA and is open Tuesday-Sunday from 10-5 and select holidays. Please call 781 259-8355 for more information.

Pope.L's Black Factory at ABMB

December 3-6 at the Botanical Gardens

"The Black Factory does not make blackness, it performs blackness. Sometimes the performance is a conversation, sometimes a provocation, sometimes its a commodity, sometimes its losing your commodities and sleeping at the shelter, sometimes its working in the soup kitchen of that shelter, sometimes the performance of blackness is simply an idea bearing on some distant resemblance from which I will always say: From here I dare to begin."
- Pope.L

Pope.L: Animal Nationalism

Grand Arts Kansas City September 5 - October 18

Animal Nationalism is comprised of two works: "Trinket," a large-scale, publicly accessible installation at the Exhibition Hall at the Municipal Auditorium, Kansas City Convention Center, and a video and performance piece called "Small Cup" at Grand Arts.

The following interview—my second with Pope.L—was conducted through email correspondence over several months. His responses are written with the freewheeling, contradic- tory energy of his art, with both stuttered emotional reac- tions and carefully parsed explanations.

For this performance piece that will run 24 hours a day for the entire course of the exhibition, artist Pope.L enlisted performers to wander around both Athens and Kassel whispering fictional texts penned by the artist, randomly generated series of numbers, and folk songs from the 1930s to themselves while publish audio speakers in both cities play similar content.

Written and signed by Pope.L himself, the text took on the absurd duty of explicating a work—titled Claim (Whitney Version), 2017—that is, among other things, about absurdity itself. The slices of bologna (2,755, to be exact) are said to correspond to a ratio relating to the number of Jewish citizens living in New York, and all the rest follows from that, from a methodical portrait-taking system to an ostensibly hyper-organized arrangement of objects in a grid with pencil lines to keep everything straight.

the artwork on show includes rarely displayed collaged works on postcards by Wangechi Mutu ART ’00 from her personal collection, a site-specific installation in ink, pencil and wash on paper by Firelei Baez titled “Memory, Like Fire, is Radiant and Immutable,” and a video piece by William Pope.L where, dressed as Superman with a skateboard on his back, he crawls all the way to the Bronx from the base of the Statue of Liberty.

The Wednesday night opening of Art Public includes four performance pieces. In Chinese artist Yan Xing’s L’amour l’apres midi, young men in embroidered silks flirt with passersby. Xavier Cha’s supreme ultimate exercise contrasts bodybuilders hoisting truck tires with the flowing movement of a tai chi practitioner. In Ryan Gander’s Ernest Hawker, a fictional character, based on Gander, plays a drunken, washed-up artist. And Pope.L’s The Beautiful features black men with skateboards on their backs who crawl onto a stage to sing America the Beautiful. All will pop up unannounced from among the crowd at the park.

“I have a very divided take about being on the cover of Artforum,” said Pope.L, who is black. “That’s something I’m supposed to want. All artist are supposed to want that. It’s really funny when you get what you want and you have no idea what it is. You have fantasies about these things, and you get drunk and you talk about these things. ‘Oh, my Guggenheim show, we’ll get drunk and we’ll be in the back with our friends.’ It’s never like that.”

Beginning in th elate '90s, Pope.L famously crawled along 22 miles of sidewalk, from the beginning to the end of Broadway - Manhattan's longest street - wearing a capeless Superman outfit with a skateboard strapped to his back.

When curator Dan Cameron inaugurated Prospect New Orleans in 2008, billed as the largest international biennial in the United States it was an act not merely of post-Hurricane Katrina revitalization but of civic reinvention. Though it received virtually no funding from depleted state or city offers, Prospect 1 generated a great deal of curiosity, goodwill, and private patronage and brought contemporary art to the city in an unprecedented way.

In 1961, the artist Allan Kaprow, who coined the term happenings, created an installation in a small open-air courtyard behind the Martha Jackson Gallery at 32 East 69th Street. He wrapped several sculptures already there — a Giacometti and a Barbara Hepworth — in protective tar paper, then filled the space with hundreds of old automobile tires, tossing them around to make piles that visitors were invited to climb.

Pope.L, who may well be the best underknown artist around, has long been doing amazing work at the frayed edges where the art world meets Wall Street and the inner city. He is best known for his performances, which have included eating and regurgitating copies of the Wall Street Journal, and crawling on his belly like a worm.

Pope.L lines the gallery with more than a hundred small drawings made in transit since 2003—on airplane napkins, newspaper photographs, hotel stationery, a Howard Johnson's shoe mitt, and so on. The images tend toward the humorously sexual, with plenty of bespectacled worms, volcanoes, and explosions.